Spinning wheel problem, DP 7.24

[RodneySauer]

I would blame this on a complicated project, but I used to do these a lot and never had this problem until the past few months, and now it's happening on every project.

I'm only recording and edting audio, no VIs, very little MIDI, to a Quicktime Movie. Two stereo tracks, two mono tracks. After three or four operations (recording, edge edit), I try to do something like move a sound bite or start a playback pass or a record pass or edit a soundbite edge. The cursor turns to the rotating beach ball of death for somewhere between ten and forty seconds, then gives the program back. After another few edits or playbacks, it'll do it again. As you can imagine, when I have to tell the musicians to stop, sorry, wait... now let's record again; it gets really old really fast.

I've tried all kinds of things: setting the buffer at all different settings, changing the multiplier, changing the number of busses, closing the movie, quitting all other applications, moving projects to the same drive as the program, moving projects to a different drive, keeping the video on a third drive -- nothing makes any difference. And it didn't used to do this!

Any other ideas? I'm running on an iMac, 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB memory, it's happened under OS X 10.7 and now 10.8. The video card is a NVIDIA GeForce 9400 256 MB graphics. I'm recording to an 828 mk II by Firewire to a Firewire drive. I don't see any spike in CPU usage in the Audio Performance window, just a freeze. If I run Apple's Activity Monitor in the background I can switch over to it and it lists "Digital Performer (not responding)" until the petit mal is over, when it goes back to Digital Performer. Activity Monitor doesn't show anything else using much of the CPU.

Thanks for any new ideas!

[cuttime]

It sounds to me like drive problems. Are they nearly full? I'd back them up and clone them ASAP.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

+1 Check the drive. Try a different one. Start looking for a new one.

[RodneySauer]

Okay, thanks. I had about 70 gigs free, which is less than I would have thought (haven't checked lately, I guess). I'm backing up and deleting some things that I don't need, some of which are many gigs. If I have to replace the drive (it checks out okay with the Disk Utility, for what that's worth), it's the internal one in the iMac, and I bet that's an Apple-Store-keeps-the-computer-for-a-week type of task. But a larger drive there would be nice anyway. Not sure I have the budget for a new iMac or laptop, though that would ALSO be nice...

I'll report back if the brush-clearing helps. Thanks!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Not necessarily "full" but the directory might be getting wanky. Disk repair is your friend. Test it,

[RodneySauer]

Digging through all the preferences, I found that DP was set to save the file every 2 minutes, which was part (though apparently not all) of the problem. Clearing up some disc space seems to have helped too, though I still get the spinning ball every once in a while. Thanks for the help!

[Phil O]

Although many will insist that defragging your HD in OSX is unnecessary, I swear by it. I defrag my drives every couple of months and I really believe it makes a difference. I'm not saying this is your problem, but it might be worth checking out.

Phil

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Careful, Phil. Defragging can also heat up the drive head, disk, and other parts of the mechanism. If it really isn't necessary, don't do it!

Another reason why keeping separate drives for audio, video, OS & programs, VIs, all on separate disks. At least that has worked out well for me.

[PJ]

It could by the same problem which I have sometimes. My problem is related to save/auto save. After I have recorded a long track and DP auto saves, saving can last very long time. But this doesn't happen very often.
Save your Activity Monitor's Sample Process (DP) next time this happens. Send those log files to Michael Miller (Motu). He has some ideas what is going on, but there isn't fix yet. If we have the same problem, I think your Process logs could help him to find the fix.
In my case it has happened also with empty new ext HDs.

[Phil O]

Careful, Phil. Defragging can also heat up the drive head, disk, and other parts of the mechanism. If it really isn't necessary, don't do it!

Too late. I've been doing it for years. If it shortens the life of the drive, then so be it. I think it's worth it for better performance. Besides, I'm using iDefrag, which monitors HD temp during the operation.

Phil

[frankf]

Another way to defrag which takes less time and is less wear on the drive, is to copy or clone the contents to another drive, reformat the original, then copy back the files. I do this with my "current projects" drive daily if needed.


Frank Ferrucci
DP 8
Mac Pro 3,1 OSX 10.6.8, 24gb RAM
Metric Halo 2882, ULN-2